I became a virtuoso of deceit. It wasn't pleasure I was after, it was knowledge. I consulted the strictest moralists to learn how ...to appear, philosophers to find out what to think and novelists to see what I could get away with. And, in the end, I distilled everything down to one wonderfully simple principle: win or die.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

To give pleasure to a few wretched souls; the knowledge that human nature craves the good things of life, in terms of nourishment,... and needs beauty in form and color, as its companion; utilization of imagination and a long-suppressed love of the beautiful to conquer a difficult decorative problem; abiding faith that in all life two things alone are necessary, love and beauty, and that in business as well as elsewhere they are essential to a true success, and, adopted as a business principle will lead to success--these were the foundation stones on which this business, the result of twenty years of hard labor, was laid.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

If we could sniff or swallow something that would, for five or six hours each day, abolish our solitude as individuals, atone us w...ith our fellows in a glowing exaltation of affection and make life in all its aspects seem not only worth living, but divinely beautiful and significant, and if this heavenly, world-transfiguring drug were of such a kind that we could wake up next morning with a clear head and an undamaged constitution--then, it seems to me, all our problems (and not merely the one small problem of discovering a novel pleasure) would be wholly solved and earth would become paradise.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Frau Stöhr ... began to talk about how fascinating it was to cough.... Sneezing was much the same thing. You kept on wanting to s...neeze until you simply couldn't stand it any longer; you looked as if you were tipsy; you drew a couple of breaths, then out it came, and you forgot everything else in the bliss of the sensation. Sometimes the explosion repeated itself two or three times. That was the sort of pleasure life gave you free of charge.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »